The most curious thing about all this is that at no time during the regressions the word “Cathars” has come to me. But this stops being surprising when you start the research and find out this word was used by others in order to make reference to them. Anne Brenon, in her book The True Face of Catharism, explains it better than I (the translation to English is mine):
The word “Cathar” was only one of the multiple denominations in a pejorative sense invented by the Roman Church to label those that had been designated as heretics. We will have the opportunity to come back in detail about these various epithets. The “Cathar” one —to which the Lutheran historian Charles Schmidt, with the publication in 1848 of his book "History of the sect of Cathars or Albigensians", was going to provide with a great media fortune— probably means “adorer of the cat”, that is to say, sorcerer. The Rhenish canon Eckbert of Schönau, who forged the cultured word “Cathars” in 1163 from a popular existent denomination, cati (Latin) / catiers (oil language), tried to give it a more cultivated etymology but also more imaginative: from the Greek catharos, that is, “pure”.
Enough to say here that the interested parties themselves, those medieval heretics to whom the present volume has been consecrated, seem to have never called themselves, proudly, “pure”, neither “Parfait” (men) nor “Parfaites” (women), these latter belonging to the Inquisition’s vocabulary. The documents proof they essentially and simply used, to designate themselves, the generic term of “apostles” or “Christians”. Their believers were called “True Christians”, “Good Christians”, “Good Men” and “Good Women”.